After Black Lives Matter Towards the Third Event: Reconfiguring the Human
This article was conceived in the wake of mass, worldwide uprisings following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people across the diaspora. As individuals protest for liberation, the question remains as to how we can perform the intellectual labor of ushering in a genre of the Human that renders freedom possible. This article interrogates how Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire phenomenologically map alternate genealogies of the Human that delink from our biocentric system of knowledge. I argue that the epistemological rupture that these scholars propose throughout their work allows readers in our current moment to consider what a humanism “made to the measure of the world” would entail.
Policing at its core has functioned in service of whiteness, settler-colonialism, and capital(ism). In that regard, systems of policing and the current prison-industrial complex (including ICE facilities) fundamentally contradict the well-being and lives of racialized, colonized, and working-class people. To invoke the words of Angela Davis, “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.”[1] However, Aimé Césaire has asserted that the colonial encounter was not one of “human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turned the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard…and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.”[2] The grammars that arose from the colonial contact have embedded Black(end) people in an axiological ground wherein the blackness is reduced to a malleable fleshy canvas for the violent imposition of colonial/racial myths. In other words, violence and pain (via police violence and other present forms of white supremacy) cannot be understood as such if they are enacted on that which is labeled “thing.” My central point of analysis is concerned with the creation of the grammars that have led to the current hegemonic code for Human (Europeans) and his biological “other” (Black/Native). Borrowing from Sylvia Wynter, I interrogate the dynamics of naming that have led to Man’s overrepresentation as human and thereby allowing for symbolic and material violence to be inflicted on those deemed outside of its iconography.
Through the engagement of Wynter and Fanon, readers can understand that the Human has never truly been achieved and therefore humanism has never truly existed. In order to begin thinking about humanism, we must break with Man and strictly biological definitions of the Human in favor of reconstituting human life to the measure of the world. In Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon warns readers that movements towards liberation will always meet their end if they are not rooted in a “consciousness of social and political needs, in other words… humanism.”[3] In order to achieve this grounding, we must map alternate genealogies of the Human that depart from our biological notions of humanity. In this article, I take heed to Fanon’s warning and aim to consider how we can do the intellectual labor of ushering in a genre of the Human, or a humanism that renders freedom possible. This effort is additionally inspired by the work of Sylvia Wynter and Amié Césaire and ventures to answer three key questions: (1) What can be gathered from various thinkers’ careful articulation of the Human? (2) How does Blackness disrupt prevailing conceptions of “the Human” found in Western episteme? (3) What new possibilities arise from rethinking ontology and our understanding of non/existence? This is not a call for inclusion into the liberal vision of humanism as it has been created but, rather, a call to consult the “territory of non-existence” to fulfill its promise properly. For Sylvia Wynter, envisioning humanism must go beyond critiquing “false humanisms” and also dialectically reconstruct what it means to be human.
Throughout her writings, Sylvia Wynter’s key consideration is that humans cannot be defined from a “purely phylogenetic cum ontogenetic perspective, that is, from the perspective of the purely physiological conditions of being human (i.e., phylogeny and ontogeny).”[4] She argues that one must dislodge from the present biocentric system of knowledge as cemented by the Darwinist model of the natural organism. Engaging Frantz Fanon’s work, Wynter goes on to propose that the Human must be redefined as encapsulating phylogeny, ontogeny, and modes of sociogeny which she refers to as genres or kinds of being human.[5]
The current definition is actually that which has been iconographed as Man. According to Wynter, Man has been overrepresented as the Human and has shaped Western episteme’s understanding of the Human. This overrepresentation has limited the West’s ability to achieve humanism “to the measure of the world.”[6] The dangers of this overrepresentation have been woven within the very architectures of colonial juridical-economic power and have blurred the core of human life and sociality. Throughout history, two installments of Man have emerged. Man 1 emerged as a response to New World encounters and took the form of Christian Man. However, during the emergence of the secularization of knowledge and politics, Man 1 was re-inscribed as homo politicus. This marked a movement from the moral (as dictated by religion) to the rational and political (as dictated by the new secular epistemology). According to Wynter, there are three epistemological ruptures (or events) throughout history that we can use to map the evolution of Man. The First Event was the Coppernican break which she describes as facilitating our movement from a theologically absolute system of knowledge to a secularized knowledge. The Heaven/Earth divide by way of Copernicus’s new astronomy laid the foundation for humanist counter poetics and Studia Humanitatis. The break from theologically absolute scholastic knowledge left a conceptual space open for the natural biological sciences and eventually the Second Event — The Darwinian epistemological rupture. Our present genre is that which arose from racialized Darwinist classifications of the naturally selected Man (European) and naturally dissected Man (Native/Black/Other).[7]
It is here that I would like to locate Sylvia Wynter’s proposal for the Third Event, wherein humans are acknowledged as comprising both bios and mythois via the sociogenic principle.[8] The Third Event (also known as the Fanonian Break) considers Fanon’s concept of sociogeny to disrupt the presumed concreteness of science (ontogeny and phylogeny) and to usher in a reconceptualized form of knowledge that redefines what it means to be human. In his work Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon wrote “In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”[9] The act of continuously generating oneself and the socially generated human are described by Wynter’s term “autopoiesis.”[10] The core of what Wynter offers includes two forms to account for the socially generated human: (the Human as storytelling) and the Human as praxis. These forms fill the gap that Western episteme failed to formulate and that science has yet to acknowledge — “humans are both biology and culture, bios and mythois (or skin and mask).”[11]
Remapping the Hu(man) from the point of Blackness is a major consideration for me. Only the systematically dehumanized can imagine a universal mission towards revolution and humanism because they suffer from universal wrongs. To invoke the words of Steve Biko, “being a historically, politically, socially and economically disinherited and dispossessed group, [Black people] have the strongest foundation from which to operate”[12] Sociogeny is key to the present meditation on imagination and the position of the unthought because it insists that we are created in/by the world in addition to biology. This leaves room for invention and imagination to create human life and theorize freedom. As expressed by Fanon, “the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence.”[13] One articulation of this radical imagining principle was expressed in Anthony Bogues’s And What About the Human?: Freedom, Human Emancipation, and the Radical Imagination. According to Bogues “To ask the question, ‘What about the Human?’ is to pose a different question about freedom.”[14] Placing the “traditions of the oppressed”[15] at the center of frameworks of freedom creates a terrain wherein new questions can be asked and new histories produced.
Thinking from blackness is an ontological position from which new modes of being and living in relation can be formed unbounded by biocentricity and hegemonic iconographies. Moreover, moving Bogues’s question forward to account for grammars of suffering related to (trans)misogynoir, one can access a terrain from which new truths and questions can arise. It should be noted that bifurcating Black gender presents problems due to the way that it reifies gender stratifications that have historically omitted black people from its structure. However, it is precisely this fact that allows violence against Black women to exceed the assumptive parameters of gender. As Saidiya Hartman critically urges us to consider, “How can we understand the racialized engenderment of the black female captive in terms other than deficiency or lack in relation to normative conditions and instead understand this production of gender in the context of very different economies of power, property, kinship, race, and sexuality?”[16] I argue that it is not enough to fundamentally throw the assumptive logics of Man into crisis by theorizing through the lens of blackness but also through a distinctly black feminist lens.
Black women have largely been absented from frameworks of freedom in the current uprisings around the nation. Following George Floyd’s murder, Riah Milton, Oluwatoyin Salau, and Shana Donahue (among others) were also murdered but have yet to reside in the collective consciousness. In fact, efforts to include these women in Black Lives Matter discussions have been marked as distracting from the aims of the movement. Centering the Black Lives Movement strictly on police violence diminishes the way in which the devaluation of Black life is present in every facet of modernity — even down to identity. Three of the women mentioned in this article were murdered by black men; Riah Milton was a transwoman. This alone reveals that, even if the threat of police violence were to be eradicated, the presence of misogynoir and trans misogynoir would remain. The “Black Lives” in question have been iconographed as cis-male and those who fall outside of the category of both the Darwinan Man and the Man offered via the Black Lives Matter movement are left systematically unconsidered. Because of this, the current movement will bring uprisings but will not bring freedom. However, taking heed to the Combahee River Collective’s statement that Black women’s freedom “necessitates the destruction of all the systems of oppression,”[17] I argue that the vantage point of Black women is an important site for thinking and worlding from outside of our present governing system of meaning/ontology. Wynter asserts that Black women occupy a space so far outside of Western thought that their critical engagement has the potential to completely disrupt the current hegemonic mode of “the Human”[18] If we answer the question that Wynter posits — “What is the systemic function of her own silencing, as both woman and, more totally, as ‘native woman?’”[19]– we will find intersecting systems that, if overthrown, will rupture systems of injustice around the globe.
[1] Davis, Angela. “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex.” (2000)
[2] Césaire, Aimé. “Discourse on Colonialism.” (2000), 42.
[3] Fanon, Frantz, “In The Wretched of the Earth.” (2017), 204.
[4] Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 275.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Césaire, Aimé, and Robin D. G. Kelley. 2000. Discourse on colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
[7] Alagraa, Bedour, “ Homo Narrans and the Science of the Word: Toward a Caribbean Radical Imagination”. Critical Ethnic Studies. 4. 164. 10.5749/jcritethnstud.4.2.0164 (2018).
[8] Wynter, Sylvia and Katherine Mckittrick. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations.” (2014).
[9] Fanon, Frantz, and Charles Lam Markmann. 1967. Black skin, white masks.
[10] Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 9–89.
[11] Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015
[12] Biko, Steve. “White Racism and Black Consciousness.” (2013).
[13] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 229.
[14] Bogues, Anthony. “And What About the Human?: Freedom, Human Emancipation, and the Radical Imagination.” boundary 2 39, no. 3 (2012): 29–46.
[15] Walter Benjamin Quoted in Bogues, Anthony. “And What About the Human?: Freedom, Human Emancipation, and the Radical Imagination.” boundary 2 39, no. 3 (2012): 29–46.
[16] Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010.
[17] Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier, Alicia Garza, and Barbara Ransby. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017.
[18] Wynter, Sylvia. 1999. “From “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: un/silencing the “demonic ground” of Caliban’s “woman””. Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature. 93–98.
[19] Ibid